EMAIL: benoit.kloeckner@free.fr
NAME: Benoit Kloeckner
TOPIC: Catastrophe
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Sphere on a non-checkered plane
COUNTRY: France
WEBPAGE: piqueselle.free.fr

RENDERER USED: 
  povray 3.6

TOOLS USED: 
  the GIMP 2 for conversion to jpg

RENDER TIME: 
  7 seconds

HARDWARE USED: 
  Pentium 4, 2 GHz, RAM 384 Mo

IMAGE DESCRIPTION:
  
A sphere, a plane, a sky.
        A circle, a line.
            One  picture.
              No concept.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

When I heard about the short code contest, it was too late: the
last round took place in 2003 and I started to learn POV-Ray this 
year. In this last round, the participants had to design an image
with less than 256 bytes of POV-Ray code (no include or height
field or anything using another file allowed). Some where able to
achieve great pictures (see 
astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/scc3/final/ ). I played a bit 
with the concept, and designed two images.
  Then, I saw the "minimalism" topic. Great occasion to try another
one! This time, it was different: I should not try to make 
complicated things appear with few code, but the image should be as
simple as the code. I tried a sphere on a checkered plan (I 
never did this scene before) with more decent colors than many
tutorial use, and while playing with parameters during a 
transparency test, I get this small black border. I had to find
good settings, and end up dropping the checker. The last step was to
choose colors. Nothing flashy, I wanted two more or less opposite 
cold colors.

  No zip file, I can afford to give the code here (244 bytes):
plane{y 0-2pigment{rgb<1,1.1,1.08>}}sphere{<1.5,0,8>2pigment{rgbf 1}interior{ior 1.05}}light_source{<-7,2,-3>2shadowless}sky_sphere{pigment{gradient y color_map{[0rgb<.97,1.03,1.1>][1rgb 0]}}}fog{distance 70 fog_type 2 fog_offset-2 fog_alt 1.5}

  Human-readable version:

// --- sphere on a non-checkered plane --- //

// Render with standard antialiasing

plane {
  y 0-2
  pigment {rgb <1,1.1,1.08>}
}

sphere {
  <1.5,0,8> 2
  pigment {rgbf 1}
  interior{ior 1.05}
}

light_source{
  <-7,2,-3> 2
  shadowless // shorter to have no shadow than a blurred shadow
}

sky_sphere {
  pigment {
    gradient y 
    color_map {
      [0rgb<.97,1.03,1.1>]
      [1rgb 0]
    }
  }
}

fog {
  distance 70 
  fog_type 2 
  fog_offset-2 fog_alt 1.5
}
// --- End --- //